Consumer

'Story of Stuff' a must-see for material Scrooges

Do the halls of malls give you a case of the jingle hells? You could kick back for a 20-minute break from rampant consumerism to learn more about the toxic mess it makes of the planet.

Fun, right? Actually, it is with The Story of Stuff. It's a short, friendly movie covering the ABCs of consumer culture. The sky may be falling, but we can prop it up, the film suggests.

The Story of Stuff was produced by Free Range Studios, makers of the Meatrix. That entertaining, animated diatribe against factory farming has attracted more than 15 million viewers. … Read more

Trends 2008: The end of marketing?

Robert Stephens, founder and chief inspector of The Geek Squad, contends that " Marketing is a tax you pay for being unremarkable." Does marketing smell bad? Or is it perhaps even dead? There have been a number of articles recently that question the marketer's ability to make sense of his/her somewhat wishy-washy role. BusinessWeek reveled in the "short life of the CMO," and McKinsey Quarterly provided some stats that reveal how much today's marketing executives are grappling with the new social media environment, arguing that "many chief marketers still have narrowly defined roles … Read more

'Consumer Reports' rates the best cell phones

Consumer Reports has put out its regular list of the best cell phones and carriers. Though this time around, I'm more in agreement with the results, like last year there were a few phones on the list I didn't love quite as much. And I'm surprised again as to just how many older models are included. Given Consumer Reports' lead time, keep in mind that none of the phones introduced in the last couple months (such as the LG Voyager) are on the list, but by and large it's quite comprehensive.

Out of the 40 phones … Read more

Peace and love for the planet drive baby boomers, survey says

Baby boomers may have retired their love beads decades ago, but changing the world heavily motivates their buying decisions, according to a poll by AARP Services and Focalyst research.

Seventy percent of people born before 1964 told pollsters they felt a duty to improve the world. "Socially conscious" shopping goals drive 54 percent of older Americans in the survey, which identified 40 million consumers as "green boomers."

Conventional wisdom may have it that only "eco elites" regularly buy green products. However, the least wealthy people surveyed were more likely to buy products for reasons … Read more

Poll: Young adults hip to green new year's goals

Many young adults are willing to make lifestyle changes in 2008 for the good of the environment--as long as the efforts are relatively easy, a consumer survey indicates. Fifty-eight percent of adults age 24 or younger plan to make a "green" new year's resolution, according to marketing firm Tiller.

Among all ages surveyed, 49 percent said they would aim to be greener next year. Older respondents were less likely to set such goals, with half of those aged 50 to 64 and 40 percent of people of retirement age claiming they would change their habits for ecological … Read more

Clean, Green & Pristine...

The binder of information at our honeymoon cottage, Pink Sand, in North Palmetto Point, Eleuthera Island, Bahamas, reads (verbatim):

"Some do's and Don'ts 1. Please Conserve Water as all our water is from rain that is collected from the gutters and placed in our Cistern that is under the Cottage. 2. Please use A/C only when you are in the Cottage and do not have windows open when using the A/C.

Electric in Eleuthera is 3 times that of electric in the USA. If using the Washer/Dryer, please use only once if you are … Read more

Salesforce to tout growth, charity at NYC event Wednesday

Enterprise Web software company Salesforce says it will be a holiday season worth celebrating: the company announced Wednesday that it is set to surpass a milestone of one million paid customers by the end of 2007.

"It took seven years to reach the first 500,000 paying subscribers and only another 16 months for the second 500,000," Salesforce chairman and CEO Marc Benioff said in a statement. "That's incredible global momentum and adoption for businesses of all sizes."

Benioff is set to be present at a New York press event on Wednesday afternoon that … Read more

Black Friday will be 'average' for retailers this year, says economist

The economy's not as bad as you might think, and this Black Friday is going to prove it, says one researcher.

"Retailers will come out OK" on one of the biggest shopping days of the year, said Joseph Haslag, economist at the University of Missouri-Columbia. "The numbers may not be great; they won't be horrible. There won't be any reason to walk away from Friday's numbers thinking the economy is in dire straits."

Predictions like that ought to make retailers sleep a little easier. On Tuesday, one of them, the nation's … Read more

Many 'green' products don't quite weigh up, study finds

Environmental marketing firm TerraChoice found that many retail products overstate their environmental attributes, a practice which risks causing skepticism among consumers.

The company sent people to big-box retail stores to find products labeled as green. In the process, it found that almost all of them committed at least one of what it calls "sins of greenwashing."

Most common was the "Sin of the Hidden Trade-Off," where manufacturers claim a product has a green feature, such as recycled paper content, but don't pay attention to potentially more important issues, such as global warming or water use. … Read more